After beating my head against a turnip for the past year pretending I knew something about social media, today I discovered I actually know a lot less about how the web works than I had been giving myself credit for knowing.

Let’s say your blog lived alone in the woods.  The question awaiting an answer is, “If it fell over, would anyone have read it?”

My approach and I think the approach of many has been to drag people one at a time into the woods and show them the blog.  Fortunately, several of you were kind enough to take the walk with me and many of you have come back time and time again.  However, “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.  But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”  Robert Frost and I both.

In the space of a year, one reader at a time, this little copse has been visited by over thirty-thousand kind souls, some of whom are still wandering around, searching for their Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs, and trying to find their way back to places where my thoughts on healthcare and strategy are mere rumors.

Last month I started a humorous missive to try to quell the voices in my head.  Getting readers to this blog, The World According to Roemer: Are Men Really Necessary, proved much more difficult.  Few people wanted to walk hand in hand with me into my woods.

After six weeks of posting daily, I had almost reached one thousand reads—a readership roughly equivalent to the number of people who have read the Meaningful Use standards.  I tried everything I could think of to find people with enough time on their hands to enter my self-contrived twelve-step program.  I wore funny hats when I wrote, networked my network, and the more I wrote, the more the readership seemed to redline.

So, this morning I started playing around with the question, what would happen if instead of taking people one at a time to the woods I brought the woods to the people?  Well that is what I tried, and in the past two hours, the total number of people who have read my new blog has increased twenty-two percent.

Here is what I learned in case you would like to try it as well.  I use Word Press as my platform.  No particular reason, I just do.  The dashboard view has a link that allows the blogger to share their posts by creating visible links on your post to all of the social media sites.  This enables the blogger to push the post to others who would not have read it, and it enables those who read it to do the same—this is what I meant by bringing the woods to the people.

Anyway, I hope this helps.